KM Impact Challenge

Information

The KM Impact Challenge aims to accelerate the discovery process of how to effectively measure our investments in knowledge and learning, by gathering and exchanging stories of what works and what doesn't. We invite you to share your story!

What are the measures that matter for knowledge management? Share your story!

Many of us are trying to find ways to effectively measure and demonstrate the results of our investments in knowledge and learning. The Knowledge Management Impact Challenge aims to accelerate this discovery process by gathering and exchanging stories of what works and what doesn't. The KM Impact Challenge, sponsored by USAID and conducted in collaboration with KM4Dev, collected a total of 47 case stories, providing a rich diversity of experience across sectors and continents describing a wide range of different KM initiatives and an assortment of assessment approaches.

All of these stories have been analyzed to enhance our shared understanding of the challenge of measuring the impact of KM by identifying our common challenges, key lessons and outstanding questions. These findings have been compiled into a synthesis report which is now available for download.

On May 5th and 6th, top case story authors and KM and M&E practitioners met in Washington, DC, for the KM Impact unConference. Participants from around the world also joined the unConference via the webinar on both days and on twitter. Thank you to all who participated in the unConference in person and via webinar!

Please see the wiki for summaries and highlights of the in-person discussion sessions from the unConference.

Resources

Dear Km4dev members:This is to humbly remind you to participate in the survey on knowledgesharing within VCoPs. I will really appreciate if you take a few of yourminutes to fill in the questionnarire…Continue

Started by Hermon Ogbamichael. Last reply by Jennifer Morfín Apr 28, 2011.

KM Impact Challenge Blog

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hello colleagues am joining this group for the benefit of learning and sharing knowledge as students of knowledge management course at the university of Botswana so I will appreciate if you comment on my post since this is part of my assessment.

I think there some challenges that are faced in in measuring knowledge management for value which includes:

Hello Colleagues, I am just new to this group. In about 4 weeks I will be conducting an evaluation in a country, where the government has introduced e-learning at primary and secondary schools. I am looking for examples/ links/ publications or videos of some best practices and lessons learned where e-learning was introduced nation wide through the Ministry of Education. What factors did it make to a success? What were key strategies that worked? And what did not work? I am looking forward for some responses.

John--a thought provoking post. Locating where you / your organization is on the problem-solving continuum seems like a critical step to ensure that one selects appropriate measures and assessment approaches to look for KM impact.

A few months ago I posted an article on my blog about Knowledge Management being alive and kicking. It told of my private sector experience and experience I had with the World Bank. I am not applying for the prize, but I hope that in posting an excerpt from the blog post I can give some idea of what impact can be produced by KM.

Excerpt:

People say give us "real life examples" of where KM has worked. My first real life examples came when I worked at the World Bank, putting in place a low-cost internal telecommunications (voice and data) network in Africa and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, beginning of the 1990s. Some people with foresight at the Bank like Harinder Kohli and Gus (August) Schumacher realized that the then nascent system of email (which many sceptics had, of course, said would never work) could be opened up to the Bank's customers and used to network and coordinate the Polish ministries and the ministries of many other countries to exchange and better codify their knowledge. The pay off from this was immediate. For example, Gus, sitting in Washington but sharing knowledge and advising his counterparts in Poland every day, managed to get the approval time for a vital $600 million agricultural project for Poland down from about eighteen months (in the best of cases) to six months. How do you estimate the value of putting $600 million dollars to work 12 months early? Even if you are only talking about a 5% return on investment (and in Poland's case it was much more than that) you are talking about $30 million dollars. Compound that initial 5% over 10 years and you are talking real money.

That money was an important factor in getting the Polish economy kick started after the fall of the communist system. There were so many other examples of success from email and the new network, all over the world, that it would be impossible to count them. The tools have changed. Now we talk about wikis, blogs, knowledge mapping and business model innovation instead of email, but the principles of helping people to share existing knowledge and create new knowledge have not changed, only improved.

Hi Jaap, thanks for your help getting us started. Yes I am aware of that function. We are using KM4Dev dgroups for discussions and using the list to let people know about the KM Impact Challenge. First message went out yesterday :)

Hi Tom,
Thanks for your comment. We will be publicly launching the KM Impact Challenge very shortly with the support of KM4Dev and look forward to getting as many people engaged and excited to participate in this discovery process. I hope you can join us!